Alan Watts Quotes

You can't discover light, by analyzing the dark.

When I get the point, I often don't know what to do with it.

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

You can't do anything sensible until you know what the situation is that you're in.

Ask the right questions if you're to find the right answers.

Understand your darkness and it will vanish; then you will know what light is. Understand your nightmare for what it is and it will stop; then you will wake up to reality. Understand your false beliefs and they will drop; then you will know the taste of happiness.

The first step in solving a problem is admitting there is a problem to be solved.

One can do something if one can see and understand it.

Human ordeals thrive on ignorance. To understand a problem with clarity is already half way towards solving it.

The more mysterious, the more imperfect; as darkness is, in comparison with light--so is mystery, in comparison with knowledge.

What intrigues us as a problem, and what will satisfy us as a solution, will depend upon the line we draw between what is already clear and what needs to be clarified.

See what you can do. See what you want to do. See what you will do about it. Find your way out.

The price of light is less than the cost of darkness.

Let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this precept well to heart: "Do the duty which lies nearest to thee," which thou know to be a duty! Thy second duty will already have become clearer.

The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.

To investigate a problem is, indeed, to solve it.

What I really need is to get clear out about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge precedes every act.

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark.

The darker the subject, the more light you must try to shed on the matter. And vice versa.

A problem thoroughly understood is always fairly simple. Found your opinions on facts, not prejudices. We know too many things that are not true.

Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires.

Right conduct can never, except by some rare accident, be promoted by ignorance or hindered by knowledge.

It doesn’t take time to change once you understand the problem...Somebody hands you a rattlesnake, it doesn’t take long to drop it, does it?

Even a room which must be dark needs at least a crack of light to know how dark it is.

Fear tends to come from ignorance. Once I knew what the problem was, it was just a problem, nothing to fear.